Lancelot

Who

A hound from the Village of Barovia: Mary's dog, missing for weeks before we found him.

Where

Home with Mary.

Status

Alive, fed, and never once on the table.

First met

Session 1, under the harpsichord.

Under the harpsichord

Something small and four-legged shot under the harpsichord when we opened the conservatory door in Death House. Sirius got down on the floor and found a hound, rail thin, who crept out and sniffed his hand. His collar said Lancelot.

Lily spoke to him with her magic, kneeling at his height and not meeting his eyes, and he answered in the short sentences of a very hungry dog: "Trapped. It's been time. Hungry." The world had gone "cold… all gray", with no smells in it. He had seen something too: "a two legs… No smell… I could see behind it, through it… Big folk." That was our first ghost, and we did not know it yet.

"I'll come with you. I stick with you." Osric promised to protect him with his life. Lily said, "So will I."

A good dog in a bad house

He barked at the animated armour and then, long before we understood why, at the tall mirror in the bedroom, and fell quiet when the maid stepped out of it. He bit a ghoul's leg in the crypts. He spent the fight with the thing under the house cowering in a corner, which was the most sensible decision anyone made that night.

Fëanor was the first to say the unsayable, back in the conservatory: "What if the dog is the gift we have to give to the monster?" By the time we reached the altar and the robed figures chanted "One must die," with Lancelot standing right beside us, the table had its answer. Drew had already given hers: "I'd rather sacrifice a baby than the dog." One of us put it for everyone: "We're not murdering a creature here to satiate an evil appetite. We must destroy this." We struck the altar instead.

The dog is not on the table. It was never on the table.

Home

In the tavern in the village, Ismark knew him at once: "Lancelot is Mary's dog. He's not been seen for weeks." That night Mary came to the door, and Lancelot went home in her arms. It remains one of the few purely good things we have managed in Barovia.

(For the record, we have also wondered aloud whether he was a werewolf, and whether he was Strahd. He was a dog.)